There is a conference brewing in Delhi. On 29th Jan, Unicom is hosting a conference on “Agile in Business“. It promises to be interesting, particularly the first two sessions of Wintersteiger and Verma. I’m certainly curious about what will be presented on the Indian Landscape-past, present, future.

Curious I certainly am, since my first real immersion in XP in 2001 in Ireland (one of the first larger XP projects in Europe), it has taken a really long (about 10 years) time before any of these new wave approaches have gained currency in India. Only a couple of mid sized companies in India, even into the late naughties, did anything like what we did back then. I still meet far too many people here (India) who do Scrum badly and then say “oh we know/do Scrum”. Fortunately there is a minority which is interested to really learn this well. Now most people have heard of these methodologies…

However, the point is, at least as far as Scrum is concerned, far too many people are all too ready to say they do it. Most organisations gravitate to ‘scrum-but’ all too readily. The last couple of years has seen much dilution in the in-depth understanding of scrum. More and more discussion takes place around how Agile adoption fails, or how to do “Hybrid” or some such. All this at some level assumes that teams and organisations really understand how to use Scrum as a framework for delivering the best possible results in projects. There is no such evidence. I think Ken Schwaber’s estimate that only about 30% of teams will learn and use Scrum to achieve success. I’d say here in India the percentage is smaller still. I look forward to these sessions and hope to report later on.

ScrumCoach

A development coach, mostly teaching Scrum and TDD. I've 18 years of s/w dev experience, some of it brilliant, a good bit mind-numbing, most of it pedestrian and even a little bit disastrous. I've been a programmer, analysts, tester, project manager and worked in various countries with all sorts of people (or is that 'resources'?)